(08-20-2019, 03:16 AM)z4v4l Wrote: you said you are a fan (see your above post).
I said "Here a fan of ZFS/rust/RISC-V .... but also fan of ext4/C/ARM"
What I was trying to explain but you failed to understand is that if I m fan of RISC-V it s because of the openness but If something else succeed on delivering what i want (open hardware with same perf ) i would be happy. Until then, I'm happy to use ARM
(08-20-2019, 03:16 AM)z4v4l Wrote: so, apart from its uber-freedom, you don't know about any advantages of it over existing, well developed and established CPU architectures?
I suppose you are happy with Windows, right ? So there is no point in continuing the discussion further as we dont think the same way ...
But I will anyway give you one more advantage (that I already told you): even cheaper product because company wont have to pay royalty fees to ARM.
(08-20-2019, 03:16 AM)z4v4l Wrote: SPARC is an ISA, there is nothing in it, making it unsuitable for low power usages. as of POWER, I told you about Freescale/NXP devices. I am on tablet now, it's inconvenient, otherwise I'd post some links to devices (routers) powered by QoriQ CPUs.
You dont know what you are talking about, do you ?
You said earlier "I don't know about SPARC" but now you know that there is nothing in it, making it unsuitable for low power usages ?
Of course you can use it for low power usage, but it's not the best choice because they are more concerned in throughput and extreme power usage.
Why x86 ISA is not good for low power usages ? Because if I m following you, nothing prevents you in using it in low power devices. And you will be right, but it will use more power, so in the end ARM is better.
Let me explain you why: x86 instruction can go from 1 to 14 bytes long and can take multiple cycle to execute. In the other hand ARM instruction are much simpler with only one to 2 words long.
So ARM has a huge advantage. So you cannot say ISA doesn't matter.
Regarding POWER, as I said I dont know about it, but here is what said NXP about it:
"Currently, we offer ARM products for Mid-performance and Low-power networking product segments, Power-based solutions for High-performance networking segment."
So it seems NXP doesnt think like you.
But if I m wrong and if one day one company can deliever more open CPU based on POWER for embedded devices, I would be happy
(08-20-2019, 03:16 AM)z4v4l Wrote: there is no 1 SoC fully open source. not a one. reset boot ROM code, GPUs, Wifi/BT chips, baseband processors running its entire OS inside, firmwares inside SD cards, eMMC modules, SSDs, HDDs etc. and there will never be. but it's so easy to make gullible fans believe in some freedom, just repeat often the "we are free" mantra and it's done. no matter, the resulting SoC will have dozens of non-free "blobs". finally, for what the reasons end users might want that a CPU would be open sourced? what would they do with those hardware design files? they won't be even able to check them out. even if you are a C programmer, that doesn't mean that you will be able to check some 75000 lines of code of a project. it will take many months of learning it, before you start to get what's inside. and here we are talking about hardware design files, that only a bunch of people could understand. why end users would need them? for me it's moronic openness, a much better one is when a vendor releases a good documetation on its product, so that people wishing to provide their software for it, could do that. it's much more imporant. secrets, that need to be kept secretive, will be kept that way, because no sane owner of them would sacrifice their profitability to some illusional religion of everything needed to be open sourced.
ouch ... lots of blabla for nothing.
I agree with you on something: FOR YOU Linux is useless. It's free but you may need blob to run your wifi drver, and you dont understand C, and there is millions of line of code.
So I can understand that you are happy with windows
But you should understand that other guys have ability to read/modify/write in linux kernel. And no, if you need an improvement in the XXX mouse device driver, you dont have to read all the million of code. But if you dont know that, you may start reading some file system code ....
One more thing: If we want more freedom, we do accept to have that step by step.
You can be happy with your linux with blob FW. You may then try to get ride of them in the future by buying as free as possible devices.
Other people wont mind about blob FW and will be happy
It's the same for RISC-V. It's one step towards openness. You dont care, but other guys do